CARMEL >> A centerpiece of this year’s Carmel Jewish Film Festival will be a critically acclaimed documentary with a famous name attached — Spielberg.

“Above and Beyond,” produced by Nancy Spielberg — Steven’s 58-year-old kid sister — tells the remarkable, mostly forgotten story of a small band of World War II American fighter pilots who risked their lives and citizenship to smuggle U.S. aircraft and supplies into Israel, then fly missions in that country’s War of Independence in 1948-49.

The movie will be screened at 7:30 p.m. Saturday (preceded by a reception at 6:30 p.m.) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). Spielberg will be present for the screening, which will be followed by a question-and-answer period.

To finance the film, Spielberg relied not on her connections but on fundraising.

“I didn’t ask him,” she said when asked why her rich, famous, accomplished sibling didn’t sign on as an executive producer and pave the way. “The very first thing I did was tell Steven what I wanted to do, partly because I knew he had considered making a feature film on a similar topic at one point.

“So I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be competing with a movie by Steven Spielberg,” she said. “But, I also felt a need to do this on my own. I really wanted to make this my project.”

Spielberg and director Roberta Grossman constructed “Above and Beyond” largely around in-depth interviews they conducted with six of the surviving pilots, who explain why they volunteered to become a part of the perilous mission and share their memories of an adventure that borders on the unimaginable.

“Somebody sent me the obituary of Al Schwimmer, which referred to him as ‘the father of the Israeli Air Force,’” she said. “That got my attention. Imagine an American being credited with starting the Israeli Air Force? It just sounded too incredible.”

Schwimmer was a New Yorker born to Jewish parents, a civilian pilot and a former flight engineer who had worked for Lockheed Corporation and Transworld Airlines (TWA) and assisted the U.S. Transport Command during WWII.

When the war ended and the State of Israel was created — still one of the most controversial decisions in history — Schwimmer became concerned about yet another genocide and decided to recruit American fighter pilots and smuggle in U.S. aircraft to help with Israel’s defense.

“These guys came home from WWII as highly decorated pilots and upstanding citizens, and then they became criminals. Who does that?” Spielberg said. “Who does that for a country that’s not even your own?”

The making of “Above and Beyond” began with what the producer describes as a sense of panic. Most of the players were dead or near the end of their lives. There was money to be raised ($1.3 million, according the International Movie Database), there was a director, a writer, a film editor and a crew to find and hire. But, most urgent, there were interviews to be conducted with the aging men who had participated in a remarkable chapter of world history.

“Roberta and I realized there was no time to write a script, no time to do anything but grab a camera and go find these guys. And that’s what we did,” Spielberg said. “And every day it seemed like I’d hear that this guy had suffered a stroke, or that guy had died.”

The interviews yielded a hair-raising tale of a vagabond group that dismantled U.S. fighter planes and loaded the pieces into stolen cargo planes to get them to Israel.

“Then they put them back together with bubble gum and Band-Aids, because they didn’t really have the right parts, and flew them into battle, often with the wrong engine and the wrong propeller,” Spielberg said. “They learned how to fly these things in about 35 minutes, tops. That’s taking your life in your hands, so you’ve got to have a little bit of a daredevil attitude. But 25-year-olds don’t tend to think about dying very much. They think about living.”

Some were Zionists, but most were simply adventurers fighting for a cause. Some weren’t even Jewish.

The 90-minute documentary also shares another side of the adventure: The daredevil pilots — young, handsome, full of testosterone — had the time of their lives in Israel, partying heavily with the locals.

“They talked about the women,” Spielberg said. “Some of them tried to be polite, saying, ‘Well, that’s all I can say about that,’ but one of the guys seemed to enjoy sharing pretty intimate detail about all the women who lined up for him. We had to edit most of that out.”

Some lost their lives. Several lost their citizenship. For his part, Schwimmer lost his citizenship and spent 18 months in jail.

Reaction to the film has been spectacular, she says, most notably in Israel, where Spielberg admits being nervous.

“This is their history, but they are not the stars of this movie, so I really didn’t know what to expect,” she said. “And, honestly, I was stunned: The reaction was that this film should be part of every pilot’s training in Israel, and that schools should be showing it to children as part of curriculum.”

And, by the way, big brother approved.

“Steven came up to me and said, ‘I loved it and you’ve made me so proud,’” she said. “A little sister always wants her big brother’s approval … and when your brother happens to be Steven Spielberg, that’s also kind of cool, you know?”